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Chris Morton

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28
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2016-05-06
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2016-05-06
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  1. “Difficult to ignore, but again, when I look at the proposition we're building, absolutely I believe that there is an opportunity to build this customer experience not only for folks in the US and Europe, but also for the folks in China. Another idea, we have this huge inventory. We use our own API to power our own services, but perhaps we could open up an API to let third parties power their own shopping experiences as well, to go to your question with Chinese consumer. Maybe we'll do it directly ourselves. Maybe we'll partner with somebody who we can pop up our API into WeChat or into another property there. Again, we'd have to do it with full buy-in from our partners to make sure they're happy to be shown in these platforms. But it's another idea that we could have. So if you know that business ITA software, what it does for travel, potentially we could do for fashion.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, and it's definitely something that's impossible to ignore. I mean, certainly you'll see in pretty much every shopping street in any big city in the US or in Europe, you'll see a large volume of Chinese consumers. Partially they're purchasing because of a price arbitrage that's just cheaper here. But there's no questioning that a lot of the sort of luxury bash in has captured the imagination of the sort of growing Chinese middle class and other areas in Southeast Asia. We think about it a lot. We're very sensitive to working with the brands to make sure that we're pricing products accordingly. So that's something that there's a big consideration for us, whether we'll actually launch, you know, I think at some point we'll have to go into China with sort of a Chinese language site. I don't know when that's going to be. I think there's definitely a lot of lessons from folks who've tried that and got burnt, whether we want to do it ourselves or with a partner. Again, I don't know. It's not something for the next 12 months, but again, very...”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “We believe that there is an opportunity to build a category leading product. Right now, we're focused mainly on the US and a bit in the UK. Certainly the brands we carry have global appeal. So we think we should be investing more in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Australia, Western Europe. I think we'll stay within fashion, but we'll go much more global. I talked a bit earlier about how we want to look at some of the in-store inventory and really sort of connecting the dots between offline and online as well.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Of the more obvious answers would be Mark Evans. He was one of the guys who hired me at Benchmark. I worked with him on a number of e-commerce companies and other sort of digital consumer web businesses. When it came to raising around, we were really excited to get Mark on the board to get your former boss to become your boss again.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Again, it's like I don't have a regret because I think it worked out wonderfully well, but it was definitely a huge learning for what to expect over the coming years.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “With this look on my face, trying to digest what had happened and what it was going to mean. And one of the founders of SongKake saw me there and asked me why I looked so bad, sat me down. And over half an hour told me all the complexity and pain they had to deal with in the first six months of starting up that business. And it was a really valuable learning because it was just a realization that every company that you admire, every company that's made it, they've had to deal with seemingly company crippling moments as par for the course. And maybe that technical co-founder, it wasn't like company crippling, but it sort of sucked up a lot of runway that had banked on a head start from scratch. The result was I met Seb a few weeks later from day one knew that he was going to be the perfect co-founder much better than in fact the previous guy that I've been thinking about working with and a lot of the success we've had as a business has been specifically down to him joining”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Like very early on, bringing on a technical co founder, probably the first major decision I had to make, I spent a lot of time with this guy who'd been a CTO from one of the portfolio companies at Balderton, got to a point where we were going to work together and had done all this groundwork over many weeks and months. And he was coming in to sign the docs on Monday at 3 p.m. And Monday at 1 p.m. I got a phone call saying, I've taken a job somewhere else. And I had no idea he was thinking about something else or anything like that. He'd given me a verbal yes on the Friday. We talked about this and it was complete kick in the teeth. And I was working out of song kicks offices. And I was there at the coffee machine, pouring myself a probably very strong cup of coffee.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I mean, there was no major thing. There's all sorts of small things, but I just don't think there's anything major. I don't know if it's like an attitude thing of no regrets and every mistake we've made, of which there have been plenty. There's always been a really valuable learning.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Having the most vanilla term sheet we could, not overstretching ourselves in valuation. And of course, when it comes to looking for partners, thinking about who's going to bring the most value. And when you think about the board thinking, you don't want a homogenous board. You want to have different folks around the board who can bring different things. And having seen board dynamics from a few of the boards that I was observing on at Benchmark and Borderton, that was also really helpful when it came to picking partners.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It is, I mean, it was definitely made easier for my time on the BC side, not only because had a number of relationships which I built when I was there, which you're able to leverage when you're raising the fund. I mean, that will raising the round rather, that will get you to a meeting. It certainly won't get you anything more than that. I think we've also taken a very measured approach to the sorts of things that we want to see in our docs. So I started funding on the VC side in 2008. Sequoia had their RIP Good Times deck then and made quite an impression. And a lot of companies in 06-07 had kind of overstretched in terms of valuations in terms of burn rate. And then in 2008-09 ended up sucking down some pretty unattractive terms in order to prevent a downround or do some maybe minimize the down round. And it was a pretty negative cycle. We've always been very focused on”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Having a curated view, we were able to give comfort to those brands that we would be a great custodian for the brand. And in fact, now they think of us not only as a company which generates hundreds of million in sales for them, but also as a marketing platform that helps position their brand. And we think about how we can help them tell their stories. In fact, we have this idea of lists, which is where we took our name, where brands can pick curations of their items, have a cover image, tell a bit of a story, which is great for the brands because they get to perpetuate and grow their own brand. It's great for the customers who get to understand these stories. And if it's great for both sides of the equation, then it's de facto great for us.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so the strategy was work with the top tier multi-brand retailers. That then will give us a great cross-section of brands. And then we can go to the brands, we'll go to other retailers, and they will see that we already have a great mix from day one. So that was the plan. There was certainly a lot of hand waving, and we were fortunate that people had faith in us to build what we said we were going to build. I think the other point is that we've always taken experience we give partners incredibly seriously. And so what I mean by that is if you're a brand like Prada, let's say, you do not want to be shown next to telescopes and toilet plungers and teapots and all the sorts of things you might see in a broad range e-commerce proposition. And in fact, that's why you don't see these products on, let's say, a Walmart or a Texaco or such. And so by focusing on fashion.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's a good question. One way to answer it is to think about where we actually started the business. So I actually grew up in the east coast of the States, although the accent disappeared a few years ago. When you started the business, we often thought, you know, do we want to start the business in the US, in the West Coast? And that was a pretty quick no because there wasn't enough fashion DNA. But between New York and London was a harder conversation. The US is our biggest market by a long way. So our customer is there, but we felt that we'd be able to build the best team in London because London has more success in fashion technology than any other city, certainly in the West. And also these sort of partnerships would be easier coming from Europe because we've got a two-hour plane journey or train journey from Paris and Milan and of course London itself has a good piece of the fashion industry. And when it comes to fashion tech net aporte based here, ASOS based here and actually the beginning we were fortunate to build a relationship with Netaporte.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's a great question. So it's got to be both. We are fortunate to carry the world's most desirable brands, and those brands in aggregate spend many, many billions of dollars building these stories and establishing these emotional connections, such that when a customer comes onto list, a lot of the searches and journeys that we see are focused on a brand I would like to buy a Burberry coat. They already have that desire. They've seen the Beckham children in the adverts or seen whatever product placement. And then we are there to help harvest that intent that has been built elsewhere. At the same time, people look to the brand of the”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Would use a customer which creates that desirability, which is what encourages you to pay those margins. We will know that a customer who sees the amazing undulating wooden floors of the Prada boutique in Soho are more likely to come onto list and buy Prada items because they have that connection with the brand. You know, it really is becoming more experiential. And I don't see that going away. And again, from all the user testing we do, we know that our customers that just love fashion and they want to shop in whatever way suits them best. Online allows them to shop when they're at work, allows them to shop from home, but they still love shopping in the physical world and it's just different cases for different points in her day or her week. Physical store, I do not see going anywhere. There may be some changes for these experiential versus the more functional, maybe center of cities will stay strong, whereas some of the destination suburb stores might be a bit more impacted. But as a concept, it's always going to be there in my view.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think there's a lot of romance involved with convincing someone that they should pay a very high price and a high margin for something. I think there's a kind of transformative magic when you get a beautiful object from a brand that you really resonate, that really resonates with you versus getting a toothbrush or a hammer. And I think you look at Amazon being the undisputed heavyweights of commodity commerce, I think haven't made as much headway into emotional commerce as you might expect because it's a different set of rules. If you look at the margins that some of the brands are making, 90-95% margins, it's very irrational to think that people would pay such a high margin in order to own this. But again, we operate in a very irrational, highly emotional, vertical. So part of it is shopping for leisure, the enjoyment of going through these destinations as these physical stores are. And a lot of it is about how brands tell stories that resonate.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I mean, I really don't believe that we will. I think physical stores play an important role, particularly in fashion, which is emotional commerce rather than commodity commerce. So I view what we do and what Amazon do incredibly differently. The different levers that drive different behaviors.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Have hundreds of thousands of amazing items within half an hour from them. How do we connect the dots? Again, we're completely allergic to operations and logistics, so we never do this thing ourselves, but fortunately there are lots of businesses which are doing logistics as a service. Again, part of the vision would be how do we use that in-store inventory and the fact that there are so many of these great items close to so many of our customers to connect the dots to build that best experience for her or for him.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “My jello shirts. Why don't you look at these ones here? Or maybe she lands in Stockholm on holiday on the weekend and we can send her a map saying here's the shopping trip you should do if you have time, visit these boutiques and stores. Here's the map off you go. And these are the key pieces to look at. These are all things that we would love to do once the physical inventory world is unlocked. So right now, you know, there are very few APIs in our industry. It's quite a technology challenge to go and access, but I think we believe in the next few years we'll be able to get access to these physical store inventory and then help that customer seven days a week rather than just five. Another thing that we could help her with, my mind is blown how I can order an $8 pad tie and have it delivered to my house in 30 minutes, but I can't order an $800 suit and get it into my house in the same time. Doesn't make any sense to me. We know, again, because of that high concentration in cities for our customer base that our customer”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “One of the most important things about the business is that we are completely technology and engineering led, quite a significant data science team, no operations, no logistics. We never touch product. Our view is that we can build a better experience using engineering data science, much like the folks at Airbnb don't operate any hotels, the folks at Uber don't operate any cars. The question for us is how do we use the data that's available on the web to build that better customer experience? Right now, the inventory we're taking is what's available on e-commerce sites, but if we can start to bring on inventory from physical stores in the real world, then we can start doing some pretty interesting things around personalization. So we track all sorts of customer actions on the site. We try to give her a personalized experience online, but maybe she's having brunch in the meatpacking and she wants to have, you know, we can kind of send her an alert saying these items that you looked at are in store here in your size, or we notice that you're looking for a white.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And actually, so I started at university reading physics and read this book and actually changed to history and philosophy of science because it talks about these ideas of paradigm shift.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So, I don't think there's an end or ultimate vision. I think the vision changes every few years with the world. You ever read this book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We thought there's an opportunity to build an aggregating marketplace on top of that. So to give you an idea, we have about three or four million items. Most department stores have orders of magnitude less than that, sort of 30,000 or 40,000. We felt the market was right to build this leading marketplace and we now have the largest inventory, had about 40 million people use the site last year, hundreds of millions in sales. So I think this would resonate with consumers as well.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So Lisp very simply is trying to be the easiest way to buy fashion online. Right now, fashion is split across thousands of stores and brands and boutiques all over the world, each with a very small, fragmented inventories. And we bring them all together and then try to build an experience on top of that inventory, which will help you search or discover, make sure you never overpay. So it's kind of like what Spotify do for music, what Netflix has done for content, maybe what in travel, maybe what booking.com do as well. And when I was at Borderton and Benchmark, we saw Ukes, one of our portfolio companies, you know, really begin to grow as the industry matured. One of Ukes' interesting businesses was side businesses was building e-commerce websites and shipping operations for the luxury Italian and French fashion brands. And really in 2009, we saw that there was going to be this explosion of different places to buy. And as that merchant layer became mature,”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And I would recommend it to anyone. It was an incredibly valuable two years, which if I hadn't done that, I don't think List would exist today”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So I mentioned I was thinking about starting something at 16. Then also maybe when I was 24, 25 close to starting something else, as I kind of went through the process of how I begin something, there was just a lot of things that I was unsure about. I'd never worked in consumer internet before. And my question was, what is the best way for me to kind of get answers to some of these questions to take a bit of risk off the table so I can, you know, I thought about an MBA and thought, look, this is too generic and too expensive and really spending time in BC seems to me like the perfect answer of like I can spend time with founders to learn how to how they're succeeding and what they're failing in. I can spend time with the former partners at Baldurton and Benchmark who kind of been through this before and some of them have built some very meaningful businesses. I can meet other people who I can potentially hire. And really it was kind of a, I saw it as like a startup MBA in many ways. And thankfully they actually paid you for it. So that became my seed capital because I saved everything I earned.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Gosh, it's taken me back eight, nine years ago. I mean, I think I was very lucky that the team there were looking for quite a diverse group of junior folks. And we had one former investment banker, one former management consultant. I was coming from working in this renewable startup, but also in a kind of crazy R&D company where we were making suits of armor made of custard. That was one of the projects we did because custard is a non-Newtonian fluid which behaves like a solid. We also had the government give us vats of tetrahydrocannibal, which is the active ingredient in marijuana, to do some testing and the impact of what that had on different people. And so it was a really unorthodox background, but the team there wanted a diverse group and thought that I could bring something that the banker and the consultant didn't bring. And I think the three of us worked pretty well together. So felt very lucky that they took into that jump. I had no finance experience at all. I had a math in my degree and that was a time.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So, when I left when I left university, I went to work for a renewable energy startup. And while I felt very passionately about the mission, it was highly subsidy driven and very capital intensive, and it didn't really make sense to me as an area I wanted to start a business in. And eventually I found myself working at Benchmark, the fund. And when the first interview said, I want to leave here in three years at least at most. So if I haven't left by then, please fire me. Thankfully, they didn't have to fire me on the second anniversary about a week after we IPO Duke's, I left to start this business. And really my time at Benchmark was learning for me to see how some brilliant founders were building their consumer internet businesses to build a bit of a network in terms of how I build my own team. I felt that's two years there was the right time to take the plunge.”

    2016-05-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC Is The Perfect Preparation For Founding A Startup & Changing The World Of Online Fashion with Chris Morton, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source